


Arrested Development

by gonergone



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 16:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16813864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonergone/pseuds/gonergone
Summary: At night he would give himself pep talks, telling himself thattomorrow for surehe would just ask Dirk out, and every day he would continue not to do that, because: they worked together, and it could (would) get weird if things didn't work out, and they were friends, and Todd couldn't bring himself to ruin that, literally could not make the words come out.He was, possibly, the most pathetic person on the planet.





	Arrested Development

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deifire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/gifts).



This is how Todd failed to get Dirk to date him: Monday nights when they weren't away on a case, Todd would take Farah and Dirk out to see local bands. Monday nights were usually safe enough to do this – there was the smallest risk of running into any Mexican Funeral bandmates (or anyone else Todd had managed to screw over in the past few years, which was not a short list) and the venues were usually not too crowded.

Todd knew, even as he guided them into clubs or bars or tiny-staged coffee shops, that Farah and Dirk were mostly just humoring him by going, that they enjoyed the team bonding but didn't really care about the music – would _never_ care about the music the way he did, and that that was okay, too, that the point was that they were there. That they were there every single week, and they sat through the music because they cared about Todd enough to do it, and that alone was nearly enough to make him tear up sometimes. 

He had wanted a friend so much, for so long, and now he had two… plus whatever Mona was. And now, in typical Todd Brotzman fashion, having Dirk be his friend wasn't enough. 

The problem was that Dirk didn't seem to feel the same way. At least, Dirk… was Dirk, and Todd wasn't always sure how to interpret any particular element of Dirkness, even though he'd gotten far more fluent in Dirk than he'd been mere months ago. He suspected that Dirk would always be at least 50% mystery to him, and he had mostly decided he could live with that. Mostly.

The confusing thing about Dirk – well, one of the confusing things about Dirk, really – was that the man was incapable of carrying a grudge. Todd had always been the opposite. He _liked_ having grudges. He loved to be able to pinpoint exactly how someone had wronged him and feed and water that knowledge for basically the rest of his life. He had never been able to understand people who could forgive and forget, which was one of the reasons why whenever Todd had screwed someone else over, he immediately cut them out of his life before they could cut him out, because the idea that there was any way forward for them was not a concept that made even the slightest amount of sense to him. Ever. 

So to say that he didn't really understand Dirk was an understatement. 

But the thing Todd had come to understand was that understanding Dirk was beside the point. The point was that he accepted Dirk, even his vast reserves of weirdness and the way he continually nearly got Todd killed, his unlikely sense of humor and ridiculous love of colored jackets and his blinding happy smile that always, always made Todd smile, too, and the way he would sometimes stick the tip of his tongue into the corner of his mouth when he was working out a problem in his head, and the softness of his big stupid hands and the warm way he would throw an arm around Todd's shoulders as they were walking down the street late at night and Todd would lean in and hope Dirk didn't notice as they walked like that practically all the way back to the Ridgely.

Every Monday night, though, he would sit wedged into an uncomfortable booth with Dirk or stand next to him at the bar or lean close to him (closer than he had to, but Dirk never objected – or, it was possible that Dirk never noticed) in a club. Todd caught himself counting every stray touch, every time their fingers brushed when Dirk handed him another beer, every time their shoulders brushed as they walked down the street. It made him feel like he was 15 again, and _that_ made him feel like he was possibly the most pathetic person on the planet. At night he would give himself pep talks, telling himself that _tomorrow for sure_ he would just ask Dirk out like a fucking adult, and every day he would continue not to do that, because: they worked together, and it could (would) get weird if things didn't work out, and they were friends, and Todd couldn't bring himself to ruin that, literally could not make the words come out.

He was, possibly, the most pathetic person on the planet. 

He could live with that. Mostly. 

*

This is how Todd succeeded in getting Dirk to date him: Dirk, sitting beside him on Todd's couch, holding a cheap acoustic guitar that Dirk had picked up at Value Village while Todd carefully moved his fingers to the different chord positions. Dirk was so quiet that Todd kept glancing at his face to make sure he hadn't passed out or been replaced in some kind of body-snatch incident (neither outside the realm of possibility, with Dirk), but Dirk was just watching him with an intense focus that would've been unnerving in anyone else. 

"Wait, show me C again?" 

Todd shifted Dirk's fingers obligingly, surprised as always by how cold they were. 

"Right, got it." Dirk gave him one of the soft smiles that Todd had been seeing since they left Bergsberg and that he was never really sure how to read. He had finally decided they meant that Dirk still kind of regretted pulling Todd into so many dangerous situations, and likely always would, no matter how many times Todd (and Farah, and Amanda, and probably Mona, at some point) told him it wasn't his fault. Dirk would never truly believe it, but he had at least learned not to say it out loud, so instead he'd give Todd these quiet smiles that were about half the wattage of the blinding grins Todd had gotten when they were working on the Patrick Spring mess. He couldn't help feeling like they were a demotion.

"Well, you're pretty much on your way to being able to play House of the Rising Sun."

"Am I really?" 

"You just need to learn another four chords," Todd told him.

Dirk looked from the guitar to Todd. "You know, you're really good at this."

"Amanda and I have been playing since we were kids," Todd shrugged. 

"No, that's not what I meant. Not the music bits, although you are good at that, too. I meant teaching. How many people have you taught to play the guitar?"

Todd snorted. "None. I don't really have the patience for it. Sometimes people would ask me to show them how to play something when I was in a band, but I always told them to check YouTube. It was way too annoying to try to show someone something like that."

"Oh," Dirk said in a small voice. "I didn't realize that." 

Todd cursed himself for being so _himself_. "I didn't mean _you_. I don't mind teaching you anything."

"You mean I'm special?" Dirk's eyes were practically shining, and it made Todd grin back at him.

"Yeah, Dirk, you're special." And instead of coming out sarcastic (a Todd Brotzman classic) or patronizing, it came out completely sincere, and Todd found himself taking a gulping breath and not being able to meet Dirk's eyes. 

Dirk's strumming paused. "I suppose I am your boss, so you have to say that."

"You're not my –" Todd wasn't entirely sure which part of that statement to attack first. "I don't –" He pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's not because you're my boss."

"Because I'm your friend?" Dirk asked, and his face had lit up in the way it tended to do.

"Yes," Todd hedged. 

"Well, thank you for agreeing to teach me how to play, even though you hate it."

"I don't hate it," Todd corrected, because he had promised himself after he'd called Dirk a monster that he would never make Dirk feel like that again, and also because he didn't hate it, and he needed Dirk to know, to _really_ know, that he was wanted.

"I had these visions of myself as some kind of rock star, but to be honest I may have put it off a bit long for that. I had no idea that learning to play an instrument took so much work."

"You've learned one chord."

" _Exactly_. There should be some way to do this through osmosis or something. How did you learn?"

"Amanda and I were kids. We both started on the guitar, but she switched to drums almost right away. They were louder, she said." Todd couldn't help but grin at the memory.

"You parents must've loved that."

Todd's smile faded, as it always did when he thought about his parents. "They were pretty good at pretending they were okay with it. Amanda had this whole set up in the garage, and sometimes we'd get together with other kids from high school and play parties. I always took it more seriously than she did – it was fun for her, but not something to build a life around. Then she got sick, anyway."

Dirk set the guitar aside carefully, almost reverently. "You miss it a lot, don't you?"

"Sometimes. Some parts of it. I used to like being able to pretend I was a lot cooler than I actually was."

"Now you can't do that," Dirk said sympathetically.

Todd shook his head. "Now I don't have to. Helping out a holistic detective is legitimately cool, even if it almost gets me killed kind of regularly."

"Yes," Dirk agreed readily, "I have found that that is one of its problems."

"We should probably work on that at some point."

"Probably, though from experience I can tell you that it doesn't really work without, you know, almost getting killed. There's probably some sort of lesson to be taken from that."

"A lesson?" Todd asked. "Really? Like… what, exactly?"

"I like to think of it as 'make every day count,' or 'don't put off the things you really want,' you know, because of the potential for imminent death. It's kind of poetic, in a way."

"Those aren't _lessons_ , they're clichés," Todd countered.

"I'm pretty sure they can be both, Todd."

Todd rolled his eyes. "Is that why you wanted to learn the guitar? That's making today count?"

"It is something I've always wanted to do." Dirk cocked his head. "You don't approve?"

"I just think it's a little… small. I mean, if we're always almost dying, then it seems like we should be doing big things."

"What counts as big?"

That made Todd stop, because the things that counted as big for him were also the things that terrified him to his core. Being vulnerable, putting himself out there, those were the biggest things in the world, as far as he was concerned. Amanda was the only person he had ever really trusted and let in, and now she didn't hate him anymore, exactly, but things were never going to be the way they had been between them. The obvious lesson was: never let anyone in. Not all the way. Dirk and Farah were his friends because he only showed part of himself to them. If he ever showed Dirk everything, that would be the end. It would have to be. "Big can be whatever you want it to be, I guess," he answered weakly.

Like kissing my best friend?

Todd froze. "What?" Which, in retrospect was not exactly an A+ answer.

"I mean, kissing one's best friend is probably about as big a step as I can think of, but obviously you're working on a slightly different scale, since you think learning an _entire_ instrument is small, which I have to disagree with. Okay, maybe if it were something like a kazoo, but a guitar seems a lot more complicated and – "

Todd had long ago learned to recognize the difference between Dirk's regular babbling and Dirk's anxious babbling, so he ignored the word vomit and leaned across the slight distance that separated them and kissed him.

It wasn't a great kiss. It was all teeth and awkward angles, at least until they got into the groove of kissing and the angles got better and there was tongue instead of teeth and soft hands cupping Todd's face. _Then_ it was a great kiss. Then it was, possibly, the best kiss of his life. It was certainly the most honest.

"That was big," Dirk said softly when they parted, nodding once to himself. 

"Yeah, Todd breathed. He could feel his self-doubt rising like a black cloud over him, but that was something he'd have to deal with later, once Dirk left and he was alone. For now, with Dirk practically in his lap and Todd's fingers touching the ends of Dirk's hair, there just wasn't room in his head to process anything but the present moment. 

"We should definitely do it again," Dirk said hopefully.

"Definitely," Todd agreed, pulling him closer. 

This was good. Better than he had hoped. They were never going to be _normal_. Todd could live with that.


End file.
